TPC Benchmark StatusAugust 2000

TPC Benchmark Status is published about every two months.
The first and primary purpose of the newsletter is to keep interested parties informed about the content, issues, and schedule of the TPC's benchmark development efforts. The second purpose is to invite new members to join these important development efforts.
We've already outlined most of the reasons for joining the TPC in another article, Why Join.
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Last Meeting

TPC held a General Council meeting on August 23 in Seattle, Washington.

TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee

The TPC-C Maintenance Subcommittee is reviewing changes to the current TPC-C specification in the areas of pricing and measurement requirements. The exact changes are being worked upon by the subcommittee and will be detailed at upcoming General Council meetings. These changes would constitute a major revision to the specification, but the workload being measured would not be affected. The intent is to allow vendors the flexibility to upgrade existing results to the new specification level. This will be possible because a tpm today will still be the same tpm with the new version. However, the $/tpm would differ significantly.

TPC R/H Maintenance Subcommittee

There was no R/H business conducted at the August meeting.

TPC-DS Working Group

The TPC-DS working group continued its work in defining a new decision support benchmark. A survey showed that all members are very interested in deploying a new decision support benchmark within 24 months. Significant progress was made in defining open issues and in formalizing an open issues list for all major topics of the benchmark such as business model, schema and data-set issues, queries, ETL, configuration, metric and execution rules. The group agreed on a 2 year development plan. The near term goals for the next four months are to present a rough draft of the benchmark specification to the general council by November 2000. This draft will contain a preamble, business environment, schema and directions for a workload.

TPC-W Maintenance Subcommittee

The TPC-W subcommittee clarified ambiguous areas of the TPC-W 1.1
specification. Included in these clarifications were details regarding the required
statistics reported in the Full Disclosure Report, and the usage of additional tables.
These clarifications were passed in version 1.1.1. The General Council agreed and passed
all subcommittee motions. There was much additional discussion in the subcommittee
regarding caching implementations that can be used for the cacheable content. There
is clarification wording in progress that will explain what is meant to be allowed
regarding these caching methods.